Google Caffeine is good for Social Media Adoption.

I was reading the Econsultancy Study that came out this week on “How will your site rank with Google Caffeine?” – I think Caffeine will be good for encouraging broader Social Media Adoption, especially for many businesses who don’t understand why they should do Social Media but understand Organic Search Traffic. According to Econsultancy..

… certain high-profile Facebook Pages appear to be receiving a major boost in the rankings with Caffeine. One commenter on the Google Webmaster Central blog also noted “I’ve noticed more Twitter pages in the results with this version of Google“. When it comes to the latter, Starbucks serves as a good example: through a US proxy, Starbucks’ Twitter account appears fifth on the first page in the current Google SERPs; it appears third in the Caffeine preview. While this is a minor shift, I’ve seen significant shifts with several Facebook Pages, leading me to believe that Google is not only placing increasing emphasis on pages in the social web but is getting better at sorting out which social web results are ‘the real deal‘ and which are spam.

If this proves to be the case across the board, it will be more reason for some to consider the social media SEO link.

…. Google needs to find a way of including “real time” results without letting social media skew its non time-sensitive SERPs.

… I think, it’s exactly what we need to “go to the next level” with Social Media, and it’s an unforeseen development that could accelerate spend on Social Media past what Forrester predicted (see IAB Canada study – and 47% of the CMO’s will spend more on social media marketing – good to know) – but those predictions were based on the search engine rankings that didn’t skew to real time, like Caffeine appears to be built to do – that’s why the speed part of Google Caffeine (speed of delivering Search Results was never a problem for Google, so it’s not really the main issue now, though it is touted as a major improvement).

To me, a lot of online spend went on Paid Search, and some, on Organic Search Optimization – everyone understood why SEO made sense – “free traffic” – even if it wasn’t really “free”. On the other hand, not a lot of people yet understand “Social Media” and why you need to spend money or even how to measure it. With Google Caffeine + advances in Social Media Metrics and Dash-boarding – we’ll see more money being spent on Social Media, even, than what was predicted.

On the other hand, if Google changes Caffeine so it doesn’t favor Social Media in the SERPS, the effect of Caffeine, will be largely invisible to most users and/or marketing spend.

Marshall Sponder is an independent Web Analytics and SEO/SEM specialist working in the field of market research, social media, networking and PR. He provides digital data convergence generating ROI and develops data metrics, KPI’s and dashboards that drive businesses by setting, evaluating benchmarks and teaches Analytics at UCI Extension and Social Media for The Arts at Rutgers University.